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The Way Up Is the Way Down
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19599 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
2,482 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Goldwasser
Thomas Goldwasser is the author of Family Pride: Profiles of
Five of America's Best-Run Family Businesses (Dodd, Mead &
Co., 1986). He has written for the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other
publications. He teaches American government at Montgomery
College (Maryland). |
A BETTER IDEA
Redefining the Way American Companies Work
Donald E. Petersen and John Hillkirk
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991
292 pp., $22.95
When Donald Petersen took over at Ford in 1980, the giant company clearly was running out of gas. Having just registered a deficit of more than $1.5 billion, the second-highest loss in American corporate history, Ford was looking for better ideas. Petersen, a veteran of the firms unglamorous truck division, delivered.
Smitten with the ideas of American statistician and management guru W. Edwards Deming, Petersen decided not only to study Deming's teachings, but also to examine their implementation. Where to look? Japan, of course.
Japanese automakers, for some time, had been practicing what Deming preached. Back in the 1950s, before Americans ever heard of Honda, Nissan, or Toyota, these companies were practicing Deming's statistical quality control. Cooperation on the assembly line, with workers' input on how cars should be made, was also a basic Deming tenet that the Japanese were following. As Petersen points out, "The Deming Prize for Quality Control is still the highest honor any Japanese company can receive; the awards ceremony is broadcast on national television."
Where was Ford at the time? Not only was the company floating in a sea of red ink, it ranked last among the nation's Big Three automakers in the quality and styling of its cars. There had to be some kind of fix--the quicker the better.
Actually, Ford's whiz kids, including future Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, had tried to put Deming's statistical approach into effect, but, for the most part, as Petersen admits, they didn't get very far.
Why? Because these were directives from on high. And, as the Japanese were proving, workers at all levels of the design and manufacturing process had to be involved in decision making in order to be content. As Ford, and its primary competitors learned, not only was production falling off, with profits dropping faster than a wrench from a worker's hand, but employees were showing discontent in other ways: Drug use on the line became widespread, with its concomitant lack of quality, absenteeism, and
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